The Little Things

I have had the absolute worst luck with clocks and alarms on this trip. I bought a nifty little travel alarm clock in Greenville and started using it a couple of weeks before I left. I even put it in 24 hour military time to get a jump start on learning ship time. The night before I was to board the ship I set my alarm instead of using the hotel’s clock. It went off that morning but as soon as I hit snooze the display got all jumbled and it stopped working. I even tried pushing the reset button with my pen but to no avail. Later that evening I decided to try again so I used the post of my earring and it was small enough to push the reset button. I excitedly set my alarm for the next morning. This time, it went off, I hit snooze, and the display disappeared completely. No use hitting the reset button for a dead battery. And since it was a brand new clock, I had thought “Oh, no need to bring an extra battery. It’s just a few months.” And of course the ship’s store sells every kind of battery except the kind I need. Or assumed I would need. I didn’t bring a screwdriver either, so no way to take the cover off.

So without a working alarm clock, I thought I would just use my cell phone. This took careful planning and calculations to start with because when my phone doesn’t get great signal it jumps 3 hours behind for some reason. When I’m lucky. Sometimes it just picks a time that doesn’t make sense at all or even line up with the minutes. Anyway. I set my 4 AM alarm so I could get up at 7 only to wake up at 5:30 when my phone beeped loudly as the battery died and cut off. I spent the next hour and a half terrified to fall back asleep. This happened two different times. I even tried using my ipod as an alarm one morning but it wasn’t loud enough or didn’t go off. In any case, it didn’t work. I finally realized if I put my phone on airplane mode it doesn’t waste battery searching for signal. But apparently when it’s in airplane mode it doesn’t like to go off after I hit snooze. Or go off at all in some cases. So the past few days I’ve been relying on my internal clock and sunrise to wake up and sleeping with my watch on for good measure. Somehow I have yet to oversleep for anything. I should add that my roommate brought a regular alarm clock, but for some reason it gains a few minutes every day so it’s anywhere between the correct time and half an hour fast. You never know. I set that alarm one day too but got up before it went off.

This afternoon though, I was doing something in my cabin and heard some beeping sound and looked in my drawer where I’d thrown my alarm clock and sure enough, the numbers were showing up again. I couldn’t get the alarm to stop going off or set it or anything useful though so I just put it back. I heard it again tonight and realized I had to do something to get it to stop beeping at least. So I decided to improvise with tweezers as a screwdriver. They worked! And turns out the battery is fine, it just sits lopsided in the clock so once I had it securely back in place and the cover on and screwed/tweezed back down, I made it extra secure with a simple strip of duct tape. Contraband, might I add. Luckily they never actually confiscated it. Now I’m just a little disappointed that I have to retire my internal alarm clock after such a short time. I think my professors will be happier with me this way though.